To me, life is a song. That’s the kind of fella I am. I see the sky, I sing
“Here comes the sun.” I see a hockey game, I sing “All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.” I see Marge Schott, I sing “If I only had a brain.”
Sometimes, this is the only thing more baffling than the people in sports: the people who try to get close to them.
Take the cases of Marge Schott and Michael Irvin.
NEWS ITEM: Kobe Bryant, a 17-year-old high school basketball player, announced last week that he would skip college and immediately enter the NBA draft. He follows 19-year-old Kevin Garnett, who did the same thing last year. Many worry that the pattern will continue, and that college may one day be seen as a meaningless step in a pro sports career. “How much younger can it get?” one coach wondered . . .
LOS ANGELES, May 5, 2014 — Six-year-old Joey (Slamma) Jamma called a press conference to announce that he was skipping elementary school and jumping straight to the NBA draft.
Of all the players to be goal-less in the playoffs, he seemed the least likely. Faster than just about anyone he faced, blessed with the moves of an NBA point guard, got an MVP award in his closet, a Nike commercial in his personal film file — you would think Sergei Fedorov would have put one puck in the net in six games against the Winnipeg Jets.
So now they have a taste. Now they know what it feels like to want something so badly, to have the devil’s foot on your neck and to grab that foot and struggle for your life. I salute the Pistons’ courage and I salute their effort.
And that’s it for the nice stuff.
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — Keith Primeau saw the puck, stole the puck, and whipped it into the empty net with a swing so hard it could have sliced someone’s head off. The arena seemed to gasp a final breath, then fell silent.
One dead dragon.
Three to go.
“There was anger in our locker room before the game,” said Primeau, who put the empty-net exclamation mark on Sunday’s 4-1 victory, which polished off Winnipeg and advanced the Wings to the playoffs’ second round. “Normally, we’re doing a lot of talking, pumping each other up. Today, it was just quiet.”
It turned out the writers, critics, talk show hosts and fans were all worried about the wrong goaltender. The guys in red weren’t the problem. It was the guy in blue, a young bearded Russian whose last name — Khabibulin — sounds likes something you receive in a blood transfusion. And fittingly, he pumped life into a team that was supposed to be dead, and a nervous shiver into a team that was supposed to be resting this morning.
“Take the best word you can think of,” gushed Winnipeg’s Keith Tkachuk,
“and that’s the word for what Nik did tonight!”
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